Iran has banned the first-person shooter game Battlefield 3, news agencies are reporting. According to the country's FARS agency, the deputy police chief has issued a statement warning stores that they are prohibited from selling, "this illegal game".

Authorities have objected to the plot that underpins the single-player campaign, which involves a US military raid on Tehran, targeting the leader of a fictitious terrorist group.

The Lebanon Daily Star has reported that shops selling the game have been raided, while others had withdrawn stock before the official ban, predicting the action.

However, legitimate copies of the game are not actually available in Iran; EA has no distributors in the country. Titles are regularly pirated, though, and these illicit versions are widely available.

The FARS report also suggests that there has been public anger at the game's content:

A group of Iranian youths also launched a protest against the game in an internet petition, which has so far attracted around 5000 signatures. "We understand that the story of a videogame is hypothetical... [but] we believe the game is purposely released at a time when the US is pushing the international community into fearing Iran," it says.

This is not the first time a first-person shooter has featured in an ideological fracas between Middle Eastern and US interests. In 2003, Californian developer Petrilla Entertainment released a free PC game entitled Quest For Saddam, in which American forces were tasked with hunting down the Iraqi leader.

Three years later, a jihadist group re-skinned the game and released a new version entitled Quest for Bush (aka Night of Bush Capturing), in which players had to battle US forces and eventually assassinate the then-president.